If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Survey - Back injuries in rallying

Hi folks,

I'm a Product Design and Technology student at the University of Limerick in Ireland.
I'm working on my Final year project at the moment which is to design a solution to help prevent back injuries in Rally.
I'm at the research stage at the moment, so I'm trying to gather as much information about the topic as possible.
I'm here to ask if you would be able to complete a survey that I have made up on the topic. It would be highly beneficial to my project.https://goo.gl/forms/rAd2bD1OcqTekL5I2

Hello,
years a go there was a very long public debate on this topic in Czech rally community (after a massive rise of lumbar injuries with the introduction of mandatory use of HANS) and as far as I remember Mr. Janda, former rallydriver, made a big database of the back injuries especially broken lumbar vertebrae from all over the world. He was also working together with some doctors on a root cause study of such injuries. It's been a long time but You can try to contact him: http://www.cimbu.cz/index.php?page=contact&lng=cze

Interestingly this type of injuries which was very common in the first years after HANS use was set to be mandatory have now become quite rare here. Likely also because many crews use Simpson hybrid HANS system which shall be much better than the solid one in case a body is hit from bellow.

Here is his old article about the topic but it's in Czech. Maybe You can get something out of it using google translate. What is mentioned there is for sure debatable but a lot of that is factual descriptions of particular accidents or statistics: https://www.ewrc.cz/clanek/14207-opet-hans/2

@Mirek: very crucial is the correct use of HANS and thightening the seat belts properly.
I think in the beginning, there were a lot of people who didn't know how to use the HANS (fe putting it above the seat belts). This has the opposite effect, giving injuries instead of preventing them. That should be a lot better now, with people getting more experienced with HANS device.

@Mirek: very crucial is the correct use of HANS and thightening the seat belts properly.
I think in the beginning, there were a lot of people who didn't know how to use the HANS (fe putting it above the seat belts). This has the opposite effect, giving injuries instead of preventing them. That should be a lot better now, with people getting more experienced with HANS device.

Yes, that is correct. That is the reason why on scrutineerings in Czech they asked all crews to come and show them how to use HANS and belts correctly.

@Mirek: very crucial is the correct use of HANS and thightening the seat belts properly.
I think in the beginning, there were a lot of people who didn't know how to use the HANS (fe putting it above the seat belts). This has the opposite effect, giving injuries instead of preventing them. That should be a lot better now, with people getting more experienced with HANS device.

Yes, I know. In that time when HANS was set to be mandatory the number of lumbar injuries was staggering. As a result many teams made a lot of noise and that's why ASN had to react and introduced a program to check and explain the use of HANS on every scrutineering. Nevertheless from my point of view solid HANS sure adds certain vertical load to the spine in case of bottom-up hit (these are quite specific for rally and raids and also these injuries happen basically only in these two disciplines).

Now plenty of crews use Simpson hybrid instead and I personally don't remember any case of broken lumbar vertebrae with the Simpson hybrid. We can rule out that people using one system are somehow more precise than those who use the second.

But for sure it's true that at the beginning many drivers and co-drivers used HANS in a wrong way. Some used wrong size borrowed from someone together with a seat borrowed from someone else in a car with seatbelts angle set long time before again by someone else. This was a receipt for problem. On the other hand I don't believe people like Bryan Bouffier, Ilka Minor etc. can count in this group.